Contents:
Fiore, and Dale Luciano," the writer told CR. He was equally good as a negative and positive critic. He could acutely debunk certain over-praised works and locate their problems -- say Don McGregor's Detectives Inc. But he could also pinpoint the reasons why Harvey Kurtzman's war comics have stood the test of time, an analysis that went to the brass tacks of the storytelling including sharp observations about Kurtzman's sound effects. While the majority of Thompson's time in comics was spent away from the writing-about-comics camp, particularly as Fantagraphics expanded, Thompson's writing has always been welcome and still has its fans.
And best of all he really knew and could describe that context. Nadel was constantly on Thompson to contribute to the flagship publication itself. It appears Thompson's last major piece of writing for the Comics Journal site was this obituary for Moebius , his last piece of critical writing for the Fantagraphics blog was likely this piece on New York Mon Amour , and in terms of The Comics Journal 's print iteration a major interview by Kim Thompson with Jacques Tardi ran in the recent The Comics Journal Fantagraphics moved from College Park to Connecticut in in order to be closer to the industry that their lead publication covered.
The company and its growing staff settled into a large house near Stamford where many on staff both lived and worked. This included Kim Thompson. Asked how Kim fit into the young company's overall culture, particularly its three-headed brain trust of Groth, Catron and Thompson, Mike Catron told CR , "Kim was the noodge. Kim was always into everybody else's business. Whatever projects Gary was working on, or what I was working on, or whatever anybody was doing, if Kim suddenly took an interest in it he would find a way to insert himself into it in some capacity.
He was vitally interested in everything that Fantagraphics did, even if it wasn't one of his books. He made no bones about it and he did that because he wanted to make sure that the project was as good as the vision he had for it, even if it wasn't his project. Its owner-employees and the incrementally-growing staff worked past many of the issues brought on via operating so close to insolvency by investing an enormous amount of personal time and effort.
This had started in Maryland -- during which Groth, Catron and Thompson also held day jobs -- and continued in Connecticut. They were still in the house in Stamford, and several of us lived in the house because we couldn't afford rents elsewhere. So everyone pretty much slept or worked. Kim was a machine -- setting type, copy-editing, coordinating deadlines with creators, paginating books, working with printers, some of everything. Gary was a big-picture guy, establishing the overall vision, but Kim was the guy with his sleeves rolled up, working on the nuts and bolts. He would lie on the floor and make sure the books' signatures worked out correctly, all those production-related issues.
Pretty much his 'work uniform' was a pair of gym shorts and a T-shirt. It was many months before I saw him wear anything else I think it might have been the party we threw when we were leaving Connecticut to move to California. He worked very intensely, which we all had to do because of the small staff and the large amount of work. We Told You So company history admit to slightly less lofty goals: The publication remains a curious bridge between straight-up fanzines and ad zines and the slicker, once hugely profitable, men's magazine-reminiscent Wizard.
The in-house instigator for the Amazing Heroes project was actually Mike Catron. He had difficulties from the magazine's founding in terms of keeping up with the necessarily strict deadlines. The magazine soon fell to Thompson, who with a series of co-editors kept the publication, which generally ran from 64 to 88 pages, on a startling, at-times bi-weekly schedule for almost a dozen years, including several over-sized specials and theme issues.
Calling it "the comics news magazine for unabashed hero-worshipping fans," the writer and academic Charles Hatfield remembered Amazing Heroes as a key part of the company's history and something for which Thompson should be better known. Amazing Heroes was the not-so-hardnosed cousin to The Comics Journal , good cop to the Journal 's proverbial bad cop, and a brighter, friendlier mag. Maybe it was a compromise, but it worked: I'd say Amazing Heroes was the unacknowledged other part of the Journal 's history, though officially and editorially the two magazines were just that, two separate magazines.
The Amazing Heroes previews were mouth-watering coming attractions for months and months of promised comics, and I remember poring over some of them with pure, uncut enthusiasm. AH also ran smart interviews and nostalgic comic book history, tastily written, without condescension or bias. Kim's long, long editorial run on that magazine, an under-acknowledged part of his career, was a great, gracious balancing act. He recalled the publication and its reflection of the broader tastes of Kim Thompson in an e-mail to CR.
Buy Melancholie (SNACKIES 1) (German Edition): Read Kindle Store Reviews - www.farmersmarketmusic.com Ein Sternlein auf Reisen: In einem Land unter unserem Bett (German Edition). Kindle Edition Melancholie (SNACKIES 1) (German Edition) Oct 23,
But Kim never let it rattle him and, on occasion, would confess a secret joy in being able to get under Gary's skin with it. A good-natured 'sin,' because -- as I admired -- Kim was almost wholly without malice. He was positive, he was a problem-solver, he didn't have much use or time for grudges, and his smiles and laughter were genuine. When I came to work at Fantagraphics for about seven minutes in , Kim was my boss and became my friend in short order; in one another, we'd found a kindred spirit who could enjoy Greek literature and the TV show Moonlighting in equal measure, to Gary's eternal disparaging despair.
Fantagraphics moved more fully into comics publishing in the early '80s, starting with the stand-alone Flames Of Gyro featuring neighboring Connecticut talent Jay Disbrow and quickly moving into a selection of high-end genre comics. This meant opportunities for Thompson to edit actual comics content, another significant, career-long contribution he would end up making to the industry in which he worked. While Kim's editorial duties would eventually include work with cartooning luminaries such as Peter Bagge, Chris Ware, Joe Sacco, Stan Sakai on both solo titles and more than one iconic comics anthology, he started out in Fantagraphics editorial much more modestly and in some instances remained so: Thompson was credited as an associate editor or editorial coordinator on early Fantagraphics comics efforts such as Dalgoda and Journey , perhaps a reflection of the collective ethos of the company.
He would later hold not-quite-full-editor titles on Fantagraphics anthologies to which he provided material and assistance without being the publication's main driving force, such as a contributing editor title on the humor-focused Honk! Thompson arguably became first known as an editor when he became the driving force behind the funny animal anthology Critters , which for its longevity and the general quality of its features during a sustained period of anthropomorphic comic books being published in the US remains one of his specific, lasting legacies.
Thompson tapped artists comfortable working within that tradition such as Stan Sakai and Mike Kazaleh, accessed a few key works from other countries, and even at times encouraged contributions comics-makers known for other kinds of work entirely, such as the cartoonist Ty Templeton, as described here. Like much of what Fantagraphics published, Critters represented a specific idea that Thompson wanted to see made real.
It's worth noting that any number of Fantagraphics projects over the years -- including many of those directed by Thompson -- came down to that kind of simple application of taste and desire to see made real via sweat equity. When outside observers spoke of "Kim books" and "Gary books" within the company, they often were making distinctions of aesthetic preferences -- but Gary and Kim's taste overlapped, and so this dichotomy occasionally shortchanged both men.
What that easy split might be said to describe is that when Gary or Kim were invested in a project it was frequently left to the individual co-publisher to see that it was completed. Some Fantagraphics creators contacted by CR for this obituary felt they barely worked with Kim Thompson; others felt he was the only person with whom they worked. Fairly early on, Thompson operated in a sphere that allowed him s share of projects tailored to his individual tastes and concerns, supported by others in the company directly and tacitly but primarily indebted to his energy and persistence for their execution.
Kazaleh told CR , "Regarding Critters , Kim liked funny animal comics and thought they were underrepresented in modern comics, and I thought so, too. The Barks influence is obvious, but there are also a lot of unique touches in the detailed characterization and world building that make it more than just a Barks-inspired knock-off. There are about pages of Gnuff published in Critters , which I think is the only time they've been published in English, and it's well worth seeking out just for that.
Its legacy is felt in a variety of ways beyond the work itself and those like Kazeleh and Templeton with their various comics projects and Sakai with Usagi that continue to work. Publisher and cartoonist Zack Soto read Critters as a young comics fan. There was a good mixture of different approaches to the material, and it was mostly pretty fun. Kim was already promoting European comics and cartoonists in the book, in addition to a stew of post-underground and 'indy'-leaning stuff.
It was really a product of the times, and it had a playful attitude and a lot of good work between the first and last issues. I mostly drew whatever I wanted and Kim would print it, except maybe for the time I wanted use a comic strip on the back of Har-Har 1 that would've ripped off George Herriman and Bob Dylan at the same time.
Kim thought that might not be a good idea, and I guess he was right. My favorite may well be the Friday afternoon he and I cut out early, just the two of us, to catch a first-day Thousand Oaks showing of Marvel's blockbuster feature film, Howard the Duck. The look on his face as the end credits rolled probably perfectly mirrored my own, and we both staggered silently back to Kim's car. Once the silence was broken, I don't know who laughed louder -- me at Kim's prescient description of how George Lucas must have been replaced by an LMD with no taste, or Kim at my contention that casting Harlan Ellison as the title character was a sketchy move.
Either way, we milked more joy out of the ride back to the offices than that movie has given all the rest of the world in the 27 years since. He preferred to work into the wee hours and sleep late, and I was an early to bed, early to rise kind of guy.
So he would run out yards and yards of galleys of Comics Journal copy back when it was set on a Linotype machine and festoon them around my desk and the entire office I shared with Gary. So that's the sight that would greet me upon rolling out of bed. In one of the issues of the Journal where we were keeping up the drumbeat about Marvel's mistreatment of Jack Kirby, we got Frank Miller to write an essay, and Frank wanted to proofread it before it went to press.
So Kim added a headline that replaced Frank's original. Frank called back and sounded very shaken, asking if we had already sent them magazine to the printer. He played music loudly while he worked, usually punk and alternative rock. He was a lot of fun to be around, although if someone held an opinion that he found dumb, he didn't hesitate to tell you, often pointedly.
But that was just Kim -- what he lacked in people skills, he more than made up for in wit. Kim was a unique guy, and I'm the better for having known him. It's still hard to believe he's gone. You know the Socratic method involves the teacher questioning a thesis of the student, and in the asking and answering, wisdom is conveyed. In my case, Kim's excellent bullshit detector would go off whenever I asserted something pretentious or uninformed or overly broad or dogmatic.
He called bullshit usually in a very witty way. So even though I learned a lot of publishing stuff from Kim and Gary , it was this no-bullshit skepticism that I really valued with Kim and sought to apply to my own assumptions. I was infinitely pretentious then; I'm slightly less so now in part because of Kim. They employed movers for this trip, deciding not to replicate the cross-country, self-directed caravan from Connecticut to California which included several white-knuckle moments including Thompson's accidental destruction of Heintjes' car.
Seattle would be Thompson's final home. Kim Thompson's Fantagraphics office in Seattle was until very close to his passing right behind Gary Groth's, near the heart of the Lake City way three-story home into which the company settled upon arrival. It was on the building's second floor the third floor was rented , in a smaller room with the company's old-fashioned news files placed along the far wall.
Until he had regular use of a computer, Thompson worked most hours facing his typewriter, situated next to the legendary Fantagraphics rolodex. When computers became ubiquitous, Thompson could frequently be found sitting just to the left of his door, right outside the central stairway connecting, basically, the company's editorial and business aspects.
He was never tethered to his office, and while respectful of other staffers' duties would frequently travel to them to deliver a note or ask a question. Thompson was a constant presence in the office, seven days a week, frequently for long stretches of time. Because of his sometimes-odd hours during the early Seattle years he took to leaving notes on his employees' desks or in their mail slots with comments, questions or criticisms -- the dreaded yellow sheets of paper, a kind of pre-email email.
Although the complicated business of keeping the company afloat made hard definitions when it came to tasks impossible, and Thompson's duties always overlapped with Groth's, he was in many ways still the company's de facto production manager in addition to being wholly involved as a publisher and as an editor.
Thompson became, for example, a primary mover behind the mail-order catalogs when the company very much depended on the income raised that way to survive. He was the kind of hard worker where entire positions could be spun off of tasks not everyone in the office was aware he did.
Thompson helped supervise the production department's transition from print-out based submissions to the company's different printers to computer-assisted and finally digital-only send-ins. This included a variety of different supervisory strategies, from slipping in certain jobs with art directors that had a spare couple of hours between primary assignments to enabling independently-minded workers with a kind of ongoing light-hand to grind through book after book on things like the Eros line, which were key to Fantagraphics' financial survival.
Early s Eros art director Jim Blanchard told CR that "the majority of comics and books I worked on with Kim were for the Eros and Monster Comics imprints, so the 'standards' for 'quality' were lower than for the rest of the Fantagraphics Books line. I sort of appreciated that -- made my job easier. It was more about getting the multiple titles out the door and to the printer, rather than polishing and fine-tuning them, like [the late Fantagraphics art director] Dale Yarger did on the stuff he worked on.
I think Kim felt the same way about translating the European porn stuff: His kind of nervous laugh told you he already knew what you were thinking, and was one step ahead of you. Even when writing today, I still sometimes think of the feeling of having Kim Thompson looking over my shoulder as I'm at the keyboard. The thought makes me write a little more carefully. I used to work as a proofreader, but he was ten times better, someone you could trust entirely to make sure your writing was error-free. Like many people in comics, there was very little separation of work and private life for Thompson, even though the days of living in the same building were now gone.
Thompson still became friends with many of those with whom he worked, and remained so after they left his employ and even the city. He shared musical enthusiasms with several Fantagraphics workers at a time when the city was awash in young people for whom music was everything. Thompson's extensive knowledge of and passion for movies was something he also shared with younger employees, at one point in the mids hosting irregular Film viewings in his home. One major life change came to Thompson during the Seattle years: Emmert relocated from Chicago to Seattle at roughly the same time the company made the trip up the Pacific coast.
Emmert was a comics fan. Thompson and Emmert lived together for a period as boyfriend and girlfriend; they married in in a ceremony attended by a small group of family and friends, followed by a larger reception in which the bulk of Seattle's thriving cartooning community came to pay tribute and celebrate that union. They were residents of a condominium about five minutes drive from Fantagraphics beginning in Fall The couple eventually settled into a small, idyllic house in the Northgate neighborhood, a place set slightly back from the road. Their pet dog Ludwig accompanied Thompson to work in recent years.
In their Northgate home the couple hosted social events and had both employees and older friends in for things like movie nights and dinners. Other changes in the last two decades of Thompson's life may have been less overtly noticeable. Increased access to the Internet in the late s and into the early s gave Thompson more of a public profile than he had perhaps enjoyed in the past. His sharp and acerbic wit, his desire to correct and his fierce pride in his company and its accomplishments made him a brutal opponent in on-line discussions, and an entertaining figure to read.
Milo George noted that the on-line Thompson was an extension of the man he knew at work. Even his memos -- awesomely long in some cases, and usually typed right on your typewriter while you were at lunch or after you left work for the day -- were masterpieces. I'm sure no one has ever considered this, but I'd gladly pay cash for a collection of Kim's best writings. For many of us, the tragedy of Kim aside from his way-too-soon death was when he walked away from regular writing.
His occasional blog posts in recent years were a breath of fresh air. He was well known, as testified to by many in the Comics As Art manuscript, for his ability to cajole and backhanded-flatter work from the various top-line alternative talents. Although some close watchers of art comics have criticized houses like Fantagraphics for their relative lack of editorial input on various comics projects, the approach used by Thompson and others at the publishing house hewed close to the tradition of newspaper syndication editing.
There were suggestions and advice early on and subsequently whenever asked for. As the cartoonists developed an understanding of what making a comic was all about and what they wanted to do on the page, they were more or less left alone. By , Thompson joked that his work with the Hernandez Brothers had become collating the pages when they arrived and getting them off to the printer.
There were few, if any, content restrictions from a censorious standpoint, even in terms of what Thompson might prefer for a specific project. An early story in the anthology Zero Zero by the cartoonist Jeff Johnson now Jess Jonsin was named after what was apparently Thompson's sole request: As the comics industry transitioned from a direct market-driven "carry everything" shop ethos to a more complicated overlapping network of targeted shops, direct order, convention sales and even bookstore distribution models in addition to the shops, and many publishers suffered -- including, at times, Fantagraphics -- for the complexity and pressures of this new sales landscape, the company's bottom-line output became more bold and more ambitious rather than more conservative and guarded.
When Peter Bagge moved from black and white to color issues of Hate , the company accommodated the high-selling publication by helping with an in-house coloring process in a way that might not have been entirely bottom-line reasonable considering the equipment and resources on-hand but served the work, and the cartoonist, and made for a better comic. Thompson and the company became increasingly creative in working with cartoonists, and some worked in a variety of formats and even for different Fantagraphics lines from the moment they began publishing.
Nowhere was this bottom-line flexibility and willingness to facilitate the production desires of certain artists used to better effect than with Chris Ware. In , Fantagraphics began a relationship with the emerging alt-weekly superstar, whose work had also appeared in RAW and in a forgettable-only-by-relative-quality one-shot with Eclipse Comics and Thompson's old friend Dean Mullaney. Ware's ACME Novelty Library appeared in what seemed like a different format every time out there were several repeating formats , a remarkable thing in an industry when not only were things like this kind of production routinely off the table from a sheer capability standpoint but arrived in an era where publishers often valued making the maximum amount of money by working in standard templates approved of by their retailing partners.
Ware's work quickly became an award-winning favorite, and ACME Novelty Library remains a defining comic book of that era. In , Thompson began editing the art-comics anthology that bridged a relatively fallow and transitional mid-to-late s period in alternative comics publishing: It did what I like comics anthologies to do: The company's next significant anthology, MOME , was a journal designed to be sold in bookstores as well as in comics shops.
Zero Zero 's legacy is tied into the quality of the publication, the range of cartoonists represented. Scary comics -- apocalyptic. Cripes, it was a hell of a magazine. Today, when translations of European material are quite common, it is somewhat difficult to recall that in the s there was virtually nothing appearing in English that had originally been published in Europe -- unless it was translated and published by Kim. His fluency in multiple languages, and his very broad tastes, made him a central figure in expanding the notion of what comics were and could do over the past decades.
He also spearheaded coverage of those comics in both the Comics Journal and in Amazing Heroes. Art Spiegelman told CR that when he and Francoise Mouly presented several New York-area comics peers with the European comics work that they planned to publish in Raw , of Gary Groth and Kim Thompson it was Thompson seemed more immediately comfortable with and amenable to what they had planned. Fantagraphics was slower and more deliberate in publishing work of that type than Raw Books was.
A few one-off graphic novels, such as Ana , failed to catch fire in the pre-bookstore market days. As Jim Blanchard mentioned, the Eros line was a home to work from creators such as Francisco Solano Lopez and Matthias Schultheiss as well as English-language cartoonists, and certainly an anthology such as Graphic Story Monthly where Thompson was a consulting editor was a place where that work could be introduced to North American readers. In the mid- to lates, as the French-language comics market was beginning to see the fruits of its own art comics revolution, Thompson tried to bring one of that movement's leading lights to North American audiences in a more sustained way.
Fantagraphics published some of the French cartoonist Lewis Trondheim's Lapinot books in album form as the McConey series, and later published a bunch of his black and white shorts in the more traditional alt-comic book series The Nimrod -- one of the great alternative comic books of that entire period.
Neither effort caught on with the intended audience to the extent Thompson might have hoped, although both efforts had decided fans and it was clear by this point that Thompson wasn't going to stop trying bringing the fruits of this work to North American shores. Every time I saw him I would rattle off a list of 20 things that I thought Fantagraphics absolutely should be translating, and he'd just laugh at me and tell me that my dream publishing line would be bankrupt in six months. He was probably right. Still, over the last few years he seemed to throw caution to the wind a little bit, bringing out books that needed to be in English even if their market opportunities seemed a bit slim.
When Fantagraphics survived a number of late s and early '00s financial crises related to distribution and climbed to slightly higher ground with the Complete Peanuts project now in-house and a solid book distribution deal with WW Norton, Thompson intensified his European comics efforts, culminating in a series of beautiful collections of translated work by Jacques Tardi, one of the great living cartoonists and something of a non-factor for North American comics buyers until these recent works.
The series has performed solidly, if not spectacularly. The recent run of Tardi translations seemed to be evidence of his determination to simply make it work, almost out of sheer force of will. It is hard to imagine such a line being possible a decade earlier no matter how devoted Fantagraphics might have been to deluxe formatting, and that it processed through so many issues before winding down without any thought of danger or damage being done the publisher was a testament to Thompson's late-period skill and the relative health of the publishing enterprise he co-maintained.
By the time of his passing, Fantagraphics was publishing through Thompson any number of European cartoonists: Thompson described Fantagraphics' efforts in a comments thread on the site Hooded Utilitarian two years ago thusly: Much more importantly, it gave Fantagraphics access to a world-class translator: The critic Joe McCulloch told CR that he came to primarily think of Thompson as a translator rather than as an editor or even a publisher.
In those posts, Kim hemmed and hawed exquisitely over the trials of bringing Swedish comedy to the comics heartland: How far do you push the language, the fidelity, so as to retain some humor? Where is the line drawn between necessary violence to the text -- in the manner of a hedge trimming that alerts the unwary driver to incoming traffic -- and the substitution of translator for author? Always, Kim struck me as an invisible man, mindful of the prejudices of English monoglots and the ten thousand distractions that pull them away from a text, and dedicated to massaging those kinks just so a steady understanding of Tardi, of Trondheim, of B eauchard , of Milo Goddamned Manara was possible.
When I felt the urge to criticize Manara, I did not think of the glass of my ignorance separating me from him, I thought only of him; such was Kim's transparency. As one of the few editors to work with Thompson that wasn't Thompson himself, Schutz provided to CR into their working relationship and a focused glimpse into what Thompson was like in that role. Unsurprisingly, there was a blurring of tasks. He and I worked almost entirely via email on Manara, but it wasn't as simple as Kim sending me a translation and then signing off on the job.
Right from the start he'd requested being more involved than that, and I was happy to give him that involvement. So, I'd edit Kim's translation longhand, and send him a copy of those edits for his comments, which I would then incorporate into the final script for Tom Orzechowski to letter. And then, once a given story was lettered, it would go back to Kim yet again for a final pass.
Kim was a perfectionist, like me, and we were happy to butt heads until we were both satisfied. But Kim's contributions went beyond straight translation, too. For instance, Groucho Marx showed up at one point in one of Milo's Giuseppe Bergman stories, and I wanted Groucho's one or two word balloons to have the flavor of real Groucho lines -- something Manara couldn't exactly do in the original Italian, but that we could in English.
Kim, of course, was able to write the line in Groucho-speak. Manara often makes literary and historical allusions in his writing, and Kim would spot all of those. He and I were especially happy with his translation of Manara's adaptation of The Golden Ass , originally written by Apuleius in the second century; this demanded a certain amount of classical language, which seemed almost second nature for Kim. In , he even organized a roundtable of comics translators that ran at a previous iteration of the on-line Comics Journal.
Asked to appraise Thompson's strengths as a translator, peer and panel participant Dascher told CR that Thompson, "really cared about creating a vivid reading experience. You junk all the stuff you know is in the way, because it was in that language to begin with, and just go for, when necessary, the spirit, the meaning of it. Dascher noted Thompson had several strengths. An English reader reading You Are Here can't begin to imagine what a trick it was to pull off that translation.
Voices came easily to him. Above all, he was a fantastic reader. He could 'go with the spirit of it' because he had such a good sense of where that spirit lay. And something that was great about him was how much fun he got out of his own solutions. He knew when he got it right. The writer and critic Douglas Wolk wrote CR of his admiration for a specific translation effort, a text piece in the edition of the Spanish cartoonist Max's Bardin the Superrealist published by Fantagraphics, by calling it "a terrific piece of creative translation -- he managed to replace one set of puns, allusions, rhymes and high-and-low diction with another.
Preserving both the sense and the tone of Max's writing has to have been tricky, but it's a very funny book in English, too. The most common charges against him were that he sometimes made all of his characters sound the same, and that he made minor changes to books to 'Americanize' them. In one of the Trondheim books, for example, the characters play Mille Bornes. Kim changed that to Monopoly. Both are annoying games that everyone knows how to play but no one really enjoys, so it's essentially the same joke, but the context of Parisian life is somewhat lost.
To me this was no great sin. I would have preferred 'Mille Bornes' be left in so that American readers would wonder about it, but I also know that almost every great comics translator -- think Anthea Bell on Asterix -- changed things to make the jokes funnier for the audience who was actually reading the translation. The more translation I've done myself, the more I've come around to this way of thinking. As Fantagraphics' longtime co-owner, co-publisher and everyday office presence, Thompson certainly shares in the broad strokes of what the company has achieved as a team effort.
This is true in general terms -- the company's amazing list of published artists and titles -- and in more specific projects with hard-to-measure contributing elements, say the office debates and back-and-forth arguing that preceded the company's groundbreaking Misfit Lit show. With more than three decades into its long run, some of Fantagraphics' achievements -- and thus, Thompson's -- are more difficult to see for how they established an indy-comics orthodoxy that few folks question today. Its unlikely survival during crises both public and private should also be considered Thompson's legacy.
Drawn and Quarterly creative director Tom Devlin expressed admiration for a specific through-line he saw in Thompson's career: Devlin communicated to The Comics Reporter that the almost wholehearted rejection of conventional wisdom displayed by Thompson in a project's conception or execution stunned and delighted him. I haven't read the Rothweiler comics in years but when I read those comics years ago they slayed me: Pogo -esque but even more obtuse -- and such an odd time for those comics to exist.
Unseen Peanuts is another story. Since Fantagraphics was doing The Complete Peanuts these long lost strips were now being restored to print. Ostensibly a marketing tool, Kim used the format for an extended essay on why these strips that Schulz himself cut from his collections over the years really should have been cut.
He goes strip by strip and examines why they didn't work or were redundant or why they just weren't funny. It's a completely odd choice and so Kim and it is absolutely one of my favorite comics in the past several years. It was always clear that what Kim published was something he loved and more importantly something that nobody else would have ever published. Speaking of his attempts to bring Lewis Trondheim and Jacques Tardi to North American audiences, he wrote, "Thompson wanted to bring the works of these artists into English, not just because they were outstanding artists, but because they represented a kind of mainstream appeal that he thought should gather an audience if only they gave it a chance.
Thompson wasn't so much advocating for the avant-garde , but rather for comics anyone could read and enjoy. Collins spoke more adamantly about the relationship that Thompson had as an editor exposing those artists to certain audiences, the persistence he showed in going to certain cartoonists time after time. Recognizing that those cartoonists could communicate to American readers, translating them, devising a release pattern that played to their immediate strengths while slowly, over the course of multiple books, revealing the breadth and depth of their abilities and interests -- masterful work.
I can't decide which is the more impressive: Jason, an unknown quantity on these shores, or Tardi, legendarily un-breakable on this side of the Atlantic. But you'd be hard pressed to find two stronger concentrated runs of work than what Fanta has released by them, and Kim's responsible for it. Peter Bagge recalled a working relationship with Thompson that improved in recent years.
Either way, I was amazed at what a good job he did, and I was thrilled with the results. He also was more 'engaged' with working with me than ever before, and refreshingly easygoing, too -- we used to bicker and butt heads a lot during the Hate days, I regret to say.
Kim had by then taken on much more responsibility than when he and I worked a long time ago: Fantagraphics put out more books and had more employees, more responsibilities, those kinds of things. But the thing of it is that Kim was able to step up to that. I think that Kim having all of that on his shoulders made him a little less goofy, a little less spontaneous. We used to have time to do wild and crazy stuff But I think that was a trade off he was happy to make.
We were doing the kinds of comics we always wanted to do. It was a dream come true. That was his dream. And he lived it. Cohen's co-worker Jen Vaughn mentioned that "Kim had a little dance he would do anytime he was supremely pleased with a review but mostly for Swedish fish and sugar cookies. It was mostly a shifting side-to-side on his toes while wide-steepled hands would bounce off the fingertips. It was either Aristotle or Socrates who admonished become what you are, and by God, Kim became what he was.
I don't know if he changed so much as he increasingly did what he most wanted to do, which is probably the most one can hope for at the end of one's life. Thompson's illness before the diagnosis alarmed several longtime co-workers who could not remember Thompson sick at all, let alone so sick he could not come into work or answer e-mail. After a brief period of apparent recovery and slightly better health at the start of treatment, Thompson's energy continued to deteriorate and the cancer spread.
By early June chemotherapy was ended, and energies were focused on how to make Thompson more comfortable for his remaining days. Despite some rumors to the contrary, no environmental cause has been nailed down for Thompson's cancer, nor has its exact, initial location in his body been identified with percent certainty.
There were elements of cancer in his lungs. Thompson was not a smoker. Between his leave of absence and the announcement of Thompson's passing, a wave of ex-employees, friends and admirers sent Thompson and Emmert letters, made phone calls and visited him both in the hospital and at home. Fantagraphics employees and Seattle cartooning community member supported Thompson and Emmert in various ways available to them, such as driving Thompson to doctor's appointment, or bringing to their home prepared meals. On the convention and festival circuit, Fantagraphics employees and freelancers reported being pressed for details about Thompson's health by a wide array of well-wishers, and those within the circle that received on-line updates from Emmert commiserated over the particulars.
Peter Bagge told CR that Kim remained devoted to work, and that it was his understanding that Thompson was even speaking about returning to work while very sick. He recalled traveling with Thompson a few years earlier. Seeing how I contemplate a change of careers every single day, this didn't strike me as an odd question to be asking him or anyone.
Yet Kim reacted at first with stunned silence, and then said, 'Why would I want to do something else? Spearheaded by Gary Groth, it was the kind of group effort to which Thompson at one point would have significantly contributed. An obituary, the formal publication of close-friend reminiscences, and a near industry-wide period of mourning and testimonials followed.
Charting the aftermath of Thompson's passing is still very much in its early stages, as friends struggle to process his absence in the midst of one of comics' busiest times of the years. In the immediate sense, Thompson will simply be missed when his friends and peers see each other on the convention circuit. Fantagraphics had been operating without Thompson since his initial illness. Eric Reynolds told The Comics Reporter that a statement indicating a portion of Thompson's workload had passed to existing employees such as himself, Gary Groth and production manager Jason T.
Miles was a fair one. As Thompson was actively involved in the production of certain comics works with his company, his passing will have an impact on the company's production slate in the near future. Some will be postponed to publish at a later date and some, sadly, will be cancelled. It was suggested to Groth by CR that a key to their longtime working relationship was that each one could function as his own man, but that they shared a commonality of cause and basic values.
Gary was the 'Dad' and Kim was the 'Mom' of Fanta, at least in the traditional Ozzie and Harriet sense of those words. Asked from the perspective of his own longstanding publishing partnership at Raw how Thompson might have functioned with Gary Groth over the decades, Art Spiegelman mostly demurred. I never found him cranky, let's say.
He was supportive in terms of moving things where he wanted them to be moving, which was a high caliber of comics based on his tastes and what he drifted towards. We weren't always easy people to accommodate at Raw but whenever we needed something he was always front and center with no reward except for comics publishing being its own reward. It's hardly a brilliant insight, but Kim seemed adoptive of something he respected.
Joe Sacco told CR of the comfort he felt taking a variety of questions to Thompson: For an artist, that sort of straight-talk behind the scenes of creation is very important and reassuring. In terms of administration, I think we were both equally skilled -- or unskilled.
It may have boiled down to the fact that we both had the same objectives but that we also each had our own aesthetic obsessions, which almost always overlapped, and that between the two, we covered the range of great cartooning better than any other publisher could. I don't think Kim would've gone after the complete reprinting of Humbug , for example, or Gahan Wilson or Bill Mauldin or the Disney books; and I wouldn't have sought out Jason or Tardi or the other Euro comics Kim championed.
The Tardi books were just beginning to come out, or just on the verge. I remember saying to him that this was the final nail in the argument if anyone wanted to suggest Fantagraphics didn't have the deepest talent pool in the history of comics publishers: Kim told me that they had to do it.
Tardi was a top two or three living cartoonist in the world, so Fantagraphics just had to have him in their stable. He was absolutely right. It was clear from many of those discussions that Thompson had an idea how far he and comics and his company had come. In terms of comics generally, he told this site in , "The industry has changed far more radically, and for the better, than I ever could have imagined, in terms of the respect accorded to comics, the level of work being produced, comics' place in the market, the whole ball of wax.
You have to bear in mind that when we started cartoonists were literally wondering whether Americans would ever be willing to read comic books that ran beyond the length of an issue of Giant-Size Fantastic Four. I know even Art Spiegelman is now pining for more vulgar, populist fare to shake out some of the graphic novel stuffiness -- which he realizes he himself is to a large degree responsible for! We may be stuck with comics as art.
Asked about the array of talented cartoonists represented in his company's catalog during that same interview, Thompson let loose with a fiercely proud response. Since we've had the Pogo license for five years now, it was more the one-two combination of Barks's duck stories and the acquisition of the EC material that gave me a sort of 'holy shit' moment of realizing that if you take, say, the Comics Journal 's Top list of yore and go down it, Fantagraphics is now so dominant it becomes almost ridiculous.
I think the current Fantagraphics list is unambiguously the greatest list of cartoonists ever to be assembled under one publishing roof, period. I'm open to rebuttal, but, y'know, c'mon. No one denied its authenticity. More personally, Kim Thompson and Gary Groth believed in my work. I'll always be indebted to both of them for that. The sales of each issue of Palestine dropped from one to the next, but they stuck with it 'til its run was complete. I don't think anyone else at that time would have considered publishing the kind of work I do.
Kim Thompson was given an Inkpot Award by Comic-Con International in , and in addition to sharing in the publication of numerous awards winners and nominees in the major comic book awards programs such as the Eisner and Harveys, he was himself a nominee by name in a Best Editor category in the former program's iteration.
That said, he loved living in America for many reasons, not the least of which was this one: His emails all felt like pages in that book," Helge Dascher told CR "He preferred to bring the comics into print -- the book could wait. If you were alive and interested in the art and business of comic books from the s until the present day then you already know how intimately Kim was involved in so many of the things that changed that medium. I don't need to make a case for his importance.
Gary Groth told CR that, "We're working on our preferred destination for contributions, but I haven't firmed it up yet. A panel at this year's Comic-Con International is in the early planning stages as of this filing. While at least one ex-Fantagraphics staffer had posted through social media of an event commemorating Thompson's life planned for either August or September, it looks like that day will come sooner rather than later. Kim Thompson is survived by his parents, by a younger brother, Mark Thompson, by his wife, Lynn, and by the publishing company that will in some significant way reflect his taste and personality for the remainder of its days.
Thompson touched hundreds of lives, and helped facilitate a reinvigorated avenue of expression for an entire art form that has had an impact on millions. He will be sorely missed. Years after his passing dozens of men and women who knew him will on some level fundamentally disbelieve that Thompson somehow isn't still in his office, at his desk, continuing to work, seeing to his life's passion. Personal knowledge also played a small role here and there.
All other information was I believe provided exclusively to this site, although I wouldn't be surprised if some writers have recycled or re-used material in the days since providing CR with a quote or two. Daniel Clowes, His Mural, Eightball Under Glass There are a couple of bigger-than-usual media treatments of the cartoonist Daniel Clowes today, as his Modern Cartoonist show opens up in his one-time stomping grounds of Chicago.
The Chicago Tribune has an article that includes a guided tour of the Chicago-based mural he made for the show. For someone who visited that city several times in the s, the imagery brings back a flood of memories. The Reader has a profile up from Noah Berlatsky , who defends himself in the comments. Here's a page up for the show itself, which will run through mid-October. Here is how you can get prints related to that show.
Three Weeks From Now SDCC One of the odder outcomes of the explosion in quality conventions and comics festivals is that the individual conventions don't seem to loom as large for as long. Just five years ago, posting this site's Comic-Con Guide on Memorial Day felt like it was six weeks later than everyone's attention warranted; now it seems like no one is mentally fixating on any of the shows, even the nation's largest, until a few weeks out at best. Well, we're now a few weeks out from San Diego.
The Comic-Con site is a reasonably humming one right now. Exhibitor information is up , including the standard map. I thought there might be an exodus of a certain kind of comics exhibitor, but there really wasn't. I think that should be an interesting show, in part because of that change of context. I plan on being there to track it. A previous, pro-Marvel decision was vacated about 10 days ago. My understanding is that what's at issue is if the language of a later agreement signed by Gary Friedrich that the original decision pointed to as a key reassignment of rights was worded in a way that makes it clear that was what was happening given the presumption that these rights are important enough that they would have been engaged more directly by a legal course of action seeking to do this.
And that last sentence is why I'm not a lawyer. Anyway, I'm happy as a general rule to see creators get a larger piece of any pie that's served up. I don't really count on the courts being the sole dispensing agent of what's just in matters like this one, and from what I understand the character's provenance is actually reasonably complicated even in a 3-AM-in-the-dorm-hallway way. Still if the legal maneuvering facilitates a more rigorous standard when it comes to creators and their copyrights for characters they bring to companies, that seems like a undeniably good thing.
I thought I'd say so now while I'm still early enough in processing it I'm not yet jealous and therefore less likely to say something mean or cutting. Mobile device amenability is big for a site like that, and having to dump the previous site's at-time scabrous, idiotic comments is big for humanity in general.
Some Pastors Reject Superman As Christ Hard Sell There's an article here about certain local and regional religious figures rejecting an attempt at marketing the new Superman movie to pastors and religious groups. The campaign apparently plays up the Superman-As-Jesus parallel of which some folks are very fond, and which is hammered home in the movie the character is 33; he takes a cross-like pose at one point, etc.
I think it's healthy that a lot of those folks are rejecting the idea more generally and as exemplified in this film. I think it's also a good thing that some are taking umbrage over being marketed to that way in the first place. It's not that I have anything against Superman, or salesmanship, or even broad metaphors with characters standing in for Jesus, I just want people to be suspicious of being sold to as a general rule, and believe spiritual leaders of all kinds should be really, really wary of it.
There was a time when religious people in North America had the same relationship to Jesus and God in pop culture that comic book fans used to have to representations of comics and comics reading in pop culture. Ernie Hudson ripping through a few Bible verses in Ghostbusters was a sit-up-and-notice moment for born-again Christians the way that Radar O'Reilly having some comics to read caught the eye of comics nerds. That time is now mostly in the past. I imagine this particular story is primarily about the busloads of churchgoers that went to see that Mel Gibson movie The Passion Of The Christ and the chance of replicating those audiences even on a minor, minor scale being worth several billable hours of some PR person's time.
I also bet that being able to write a story about Superman brings more hits than most of what appears on this page of the newspaper. Again, the thing that sort of freaks me out is the assumption that fan desires for a specific consumption experience are this viable concern, which is just so freaking not in my DNA, perhaps because of my age. The only way I can wrap my mind around that is that this value is in part the creation of these companies that then suffer the results.
I think it's odd that in many cases, those stories aren't really stories, they're a series of plot points and changes in the status quo. Since that's the case, I can almost see arguing that it hardly matters where that kind of thing is communicated. In other words, I doubt that anyone's overall enjoyment of that Ultron story would have surged had they not known of the plot point in question; they just would have enjoyed that specific plot reveal more.
Caleb Mozzocco calls bullshit on this super-claim. Josie Campbell talks to Paul Levitz. I admire that project and I've liked some of the comics. I will say, though, that I think they've been super hit and miss content-wise, at least the ones I've read, including one of the worst comics I've ever encountered from an ostensibly talented cartoonist.
So hopefully this will provide more time to better develop and curate the content end of things as well. Pamphlet comics can provide a significant opportunity to develop talent as well as an audience for that talent, so I'd love to see this project do well moving forward. Until then, enjoy this presentation from the recent show in Charlotte. You want all the Peanuts. Man, there are a lot of comics shows now.
I will admit to my usual confusion over how this isn't clear editorializing that seems totally fair to me just as an opinion to hold and express no matter where I might personally fall on the spectrum of belief about such soldiers, the wider situation and the people involved.
Then again, this case will not be tried in a court based in my living room. It seems to me there are a good half-dozen major suits against cartoonists a year now in countries all over the world, and that this is a worrisome trend. At question is a cartoon posted to the cartoonist's Facebook account that compared Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra to a prostitute, as in "worse than a prostitute.
The charges were acknowledged, and the cartoonist will submit a statement in his defense at a later date. I'm not enmeshed in the way other country's work, but I'm generally super-suspicious of sitting officials using the civil courts or the criminal courts being used on their behalf in a way that curtails expression. That group has done a pretty good job of mainstreaming into its body a lot of the younger cartoonists that are not necessarily going to have the same career paths as the previous generation.
I'm not sure what there is to talk about, but whatever's on the mind of the membership will be revealed by Monday. I believe Rutu Modan and Seth might be new, too, or at least sort of new. Both of them are smart, articulate festival guests whenever they're invited. I've heard rumors of Jeff Smith and Raina Telgemeier, but that announcement looks like it may come as exactly the worst timing for this weekly column -- I'll update when I know in one of the randoms, for sure.
I'll start building the part of this post ASAP. I would love to go to a show in Baltimore, and I used to visit that city once or twice a year 20 years ago. I never seem to get out to that show, though. People are very fond of it. I gotta go to one of these, too. The Collective Memory for that show is here. Those were harder to find than most reports like this used to be, but there was a lot of writing from that show, and I'll need to take one more pass to look for random blog entries, video and photos so there's likely more. The upshot is that with some solid administration and whatever amount of luck might be necessary in a festival's early years, that show has a great chance to stick.
Chicago is a great comics town, cartoonists want to visit Chicago, and the regional fan base should grow accustomed to the show being there in a way that has a fine chance of allowing the festival an audience year to year. Sean Gaffney on Vol. Kevin Cortez on a pair of small-press efforts. What kind of stuff was happening when is an interesting question to ask of those kinds of works. I would imagine that a lot of these libraries will be judged in the future in part on access issues, so as much information as we can learn is valuable.
Matt Emerey profiles John Kent. Steve Sunu talks to Sam Humphries. David Petersen talks to Ben Caldwell. Shawn Starr talks to Ales Kot. She is pivoting from a post by Dave Sim here. The ability of cartoonists and interested archivists to restore material to publishable form is often assumed, and can be way more difficult than initially realized due to all sorts of reasons including the state of the original art, the ability to get to copies of older art from which newer copies can be derived, and publishing effects that modern publishing techniques are ill-equipped to facilitate.
All of these things can result in books that may be impossible to execute to one hundred percent satisfaction, or that merely price themselves beyond the resources of those seeking a new edition. This isn't a a new thing. For instance, newspaper strip reprints have always had a lot of these problems, or similar ones. There aren't always copies available of every strip that people want to see reprinted, and features that ran in the post-War era were sometimes truncated and have material literally cut out of them on the right side or on the bottom to fit into shrinking places on the comics pages from which copies were clipped and saved.
It's frequently a testament to the skill of people that help make these strips available, and the same goes for comic book work like Doran's, that we get a lot of the comics made available to us. Notable Releases To The Comics Direct Market Here are the books that make an impression on me staring at this week's no-doubt largely accurate list of books shipping from Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. I might not buy all of the works listed here. I might not buy any.
I'd sure look at the following, though. Dash Shaw's book is fascinating-looking, and he's doing a lot of things with presentation and color that I think should drive you to at least check this one out at your comics shop. This isn't that material, but a recent two-volume work presented here under one cover and I am a sucker for devouring work from an unknown-to-me, younger artist in that way. I like the art I've seen, too.
It looks like it breaks down by writer. I wasn't so hot on the project, but I think these volumes look handsome and some of the comics are by first-rate comics makers. It's amazing that the Gould is up to Volume 15 already. My dad's favorite comic book as a little kid was the Daredevil material and that book certainly features a bunch of Golden Age stalwarts.
I don't remember being all that impressed with the comics themselves, though. The first two listed above are works featuring the talents of Brian Wood and Matt Kindt as they head into double-digits serial-comics wise. I read that one; it's very pretty but the story is The Unwritten comic is a crossover into the Fables comic book; both of those series are solid performers for Vertigo, but my guess is that the latter outperforms the former by a significant amount.
The Bounce and Sex books are from writer Joe Casey and continue his recent run of odd, compelling genre series. Prophet is one of the solid performers in sort-of superhero comics of the last couple of years. Fifteen-year-old me would be very broke and very happy. I swear the Alternative Comics anthology return was already listed as coming out, but it's fine to do so again. That realm of comics could use as many platforms to see a mix of new and old artists as is possible. The David Petersen book looks like the beginning of a new cycle for that reliable performer; those books are so not my cup of tea just on a personal taste basis, but they're lovingly executed and there's not a whole lot of company for books like that these days.
I don't begrudge Petersen a single reader, and I hope there are a lot of them. If I'm right, there are at least three pretty strong offerings in the high-end genre portion of the shop out there today: It's simplistic yet effective. It has this slightly humorous edge to it to that I love. The final track "My Melancholy Blues" is a slow, dramatic, theatrical experience. Its the perfectly way to settle down for the the closing of the album.
The jazzy piano with Freddie's smooth vocals are a match made in heavan. Overall this album is perfection. This is my favourite Queen album so far into their discography. There's not a single bad moment throughout. The sharp prodiction and passionate delivery rarely takes a breath.
De derde Puur Sessions zal aanstaande zondag plaatsvinden met niemand minder dan Loren Nine. Dat belooft veel goeds. Met wie kom jij gezellig langs? He da best fantasticsamspearlridge. Unkoisback selflove backtothegrind noneedrideordie thereislifeafterafterthestorm whoneedsyou silverfoxunko - 1 month ago. I woke up like this. The clarity and freedom is unreal and refreshing. Sometimes you just need to feel special for a change Great set by lorennine live at afaslive , opening for caroemerald tour livemusic whoneedsyou - 1 month ago.
Last day of the tour! Ok, please hear me out. This is NOT to toot my own horn This post is to encourage more of this! Sonic drink 99 cents with your Eagle card! I was at the Oakland Coliseum to see Queen when this album came out. Talk about staying power. The movie was awesome! I'll probably see it again. Gotta stay out them feelings but stay after dat bag.. Dreams do come true! Park City does Nashville! Hikayeye bakarsaniz ne demek istedigimi anlayacaksiniz. My Season of chasing folk has come to a end.
Another day for earlgrey madmagazine alfredeneuman whoneedsyou teatime posh notreally bigelowtea - 2 months ago. The calm before the storm gayboy gaypride photooftheday selfie filters igaddict beauty nimue youcantsitwithus cleanshave followforfollow like4like lifestyle lovemylife gayboy professional whoneedsyou wineanddine gaypride gay instagay fitnessaddict modelswanted beautyblog girly girlsnight girltime model modellife beautyphotography beautyproducts - 2 months ago.
Spontaneous night Market with this monster gaypride gayboy professional whoneedsyou photooftheday instafamous instagay instadaily gayboys friends - 2 months ago. Tired of the high school drama time for some people to grow up youwishyouwereme girlswithshorthair girlswholooklikeboys atleastimnotfake whoneedsyou alternative alien weirdo staystrange babybat alternativemodel followme legallittlesleague fuckthehaters pettybitches overit - 2 months ago. Cause I want it to be far from over.
I present to you A vent art about the situation that didnt occur too long ago, on September 25th. Still bothers me though.